Artist of Reference

The referenced CCP artist is a European artist, art teacher, and musician who was an early pioneer of modernism. The reference pictures, chosen from his extensive body of work, are from his later years. They are abstract pastels composed from inner felt sensing

Following the Traces of an Artist, Art Teacher and Musician

The artist referenced in Creative Compassion Practice is Adolf Hölzel, an early Modernist pioneer. He began creating non-figurative works in 1905. His later body of work (1920–1934) contains abstract pastels that align with the mission of our approach

Abstract art offers freedom of expression.
Abstract references allow art practitioners to explore art based on their personal aesthetic feelings. Abstracts are interactive. It is the viewer, not the artist, who gives meaning

As we began to express ourselves in abstract forms, we noticed a kind of "Hölzeln" in our artwork. "Hölzeln" is a term Adolf Hölzel used for artwork by his students that tried to copy his style. At that time, we were not familiar with Hölzel's body of work. Nevertheless, an unconscious force seemed to guide us when we experimented with color and shape

Upon reflection, we found that colorful forms, shapes, and lines (either curved or straight) are essential to us humans. They symbolize contradictory life principles and are metaphors for the circle and the ladder (Matthew Fox), representing dichotomous orientations toward the world. These orientations are either social (circle) or self-oriented (ladder)

Instead of invading his students' artwork with his brush, Hölzel taught composition and color didactics (painted-in corrections were the norm). He encouraged experimentation and was open to learning from his students

INFOBOX Hölzel's Intermodal Sense

Adolf Hölzel was the first modern artist to combine visual art and music. His artwork from 1900 predates Wassily Kandinsky's studies on color and sound. As both a musician and an artist, Hölzel composed his artwork using color triads based on musical triad theory. To him, each color represented a musical tone

He combined colors and complementary colors in such a way that his paintings show harmonic triad-like harmony. To complete a painting, he shifted between painting and music to identify and incorporate missing tones. According to Hölzel, the artist is a servant of the composition, not an agent who creates at will

'A picture wants to be painted, not I will go and paint a picture' (Adolf Hölzel)

from <https://www.adolf-hoelzel.de/kunstschule> translated with www.deepl.com

Hölzel's Sound of Colors: Piano piece, minute 02:16-02:39, composed to Adolf Hölzel's artwork Color Composition I; a musical contribution by Ignaz-Taschner-High School in Dachau © BR.de

Audio: German spoken. Transcript: English translation

Adolf Hölzel's original artwork Composition I © Picture Gallery Dachau

Holzels Sound of Color Audioguide

English Transcipt © FOCUSZAT Freda Blob

INFOBOX Adolf Hölzel: Bio

Born in Olmütz (Moravia), trained as a typesetter in Gotha GER

1871 The family moves to Vienna, Hölzel becomes a guest student at the Vienna Academy

1876 Hölzel moves to Munich and studies at the Munich Art Academy

1879 to 1882 master student in the class of Wilhelm von Diez, one of the few genre painters at the academy, which at this time is considered the European center of history painting

1887 First study trip to Paris with Arthur Langhammer, in the same year move to Dachau near Munich

1892 Hölzels is founder of the private 'Dachau School of Painting', followed by the formation of the 'New Dachau Painting Group' with Arthur Langhammer and Ludwig Dill. This group is inspired by the French 'Barbizon School' and its anti-academism and painting concept of the 'Paysage intime'. In the same year, the 'Munic Secession' split off from the 'Munic Artists' Cooperative' of which Hölzel was a founding member. He is also a member of the 'Association of Fine Artists' of Austria and publishes his first essay on art theory in its journal 'Ver Sacrum' in 1901

1905 Appointed to the 'Royal Academie of Fine Art' (today 'State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart') as professor of the composition class

1907 Meeting with Paul Sérusier, a member of the 'Nabis' group around Paul Gaugin

1910 Execution of the mural 'The Crucified' in the Garrison Church in Ulm (today Church of St. Paul) built by Theodor Fischer; the mural is partially painted over in the 1960s

1911 Ida Kerkovius, who already took lessons from Hölzel in Dachau, becomes Hölzel's assistant. The 'Hölzel Circle' is formed, which manifests itself in 1916 with an exhibition at the Art Society Freiburg

1914 First glass windows for the boardroom of the Bahlsen-Werke Hannover

1916 to 1918 director of the Stuttgart Art Academy

1918 First major solo exhibition at the Kestner-Society, Hanover. Consul Fritz Beinhoff, owner of the company Günther Wagner, Pelikan Werke, acquires all the exhibits in the exhibition

1919 Hölzel leaves the Stuttgart Art Academy

1927 Teacher at the Stuttgart Free Artschool founded by his student August Ludwig Schmitt

1928-1929 Glass windows for Stuttgart City Hall, for the Pelikan-Werke Hanover 1932-1933 and for the J.F. Maercklin office building in 1934

1933 As a result of the National Socialists' seizure of power, the large survey exhibition 'Hölzel And His Circle' for the National Art Exhibition in Stuttgart is canceled

from: Collection Artist Hölzel LLBW, translation with www.deepl.com

Adolf Hölzel: Early Pioneer

Adolf Hölzel was an influential artist and theoretician who encouraged numerous well-known artists to find their own style. His works are characterized by intense colors and the reduction of figures to an abstract language. His teaching of artistic techniques and color theory, as well as his focus on the fundamental forces inherent in works of art, were important for the development of modernism in Germany


As a painter, draftsman, and art theorist, Adolf Hölzel (1853–1934) studied artistic processes. He was a professor at the Stuttgart Academy of Art from 1905 to 1919, influencing numerous students and artists


When Hölzel was appointed to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart in November 1905, the professors believed they had found a Dachau artist who taught 19th-century colored tone painting. However, Hölzel had already taken a significant step towards abstraction beyond naturalistic painting


In the years that followed, Hölzel gathered students around him who developed their own styles in his composition class, guided by his teachings. Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), who taught at the Stuttgart Academy of Art as a professor from 1946, summed up Hölzel’s teaching and his position at the art academy in a pointed manner: 'A very rare case for the art academy of the time occurred: a professor continued to develop artistically. He took bold steps forward. All the art officials and his fellow professors, ( ...) must have been horrified by such a dangerous change. Hölzel would never have become a professor with such paintings, yet he became an exponent of modernism in wider circles. He developed an eye for art outside of academia. He studied what was seen as revolutionary art and showed his students examples, examining them for color chords and hidden construction lines. Although the boundaries of art were broken through and wide, free forms opened up, Hölzel's actual teaching was very measured, according to rules involving diagonals, squares, circles, and the golden section' (Willi Baumeister, in: Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, January 26, 1949)

from: Art Museum Reutlingen, Hölzel Exhibition October, 23, 2022 - May, 5, 2023, translated with www.deepl.com

Adolf Hölzel: Art Teacher

(...) Adolf Hölzel attracted widespread attention in the 1880s and early 1890s with his naturalistic genre and landscape paintings, which were stylistically similar to those of Wilhelm Leibl

He achieved great recognition as an art teacher through the private painting school he founded in Dachau in 1892. Influences of Impressionism and Art Nouveau characterize his paintings from around the turn of the century

Hölzel developed color theories and compositional doctrines but saw their limitations in "sensation." He evoked this himself by drawing with his eyes closed for a time after waking up, for example, to achieve a dreamlike state. He proclaimed: 'The law in art is the formula gained from sensation.' Thus, Hölzel was one of the first artists to recognize the unconscious mind's potential in visual art

It wasn't until the 1920s that the Surrealists around André Breton used similar methods in their preferred "écriture automatique." After his appointment to the Stuttgart Art Academy in 1905, Hölzel's art changed, adopting a theoretically grounded approach to abstraction, of which he was one of the founders

Inspired by the two-dimensional, color-intensive paintings of the French artist group Nabis, which Paul Gauguin co-founded, Hölzel increasingly created abstract figure compositions with heightened color intensity

Hölzel, a violinist, strived for absolute paintings with differentiated color harmonies, following the ideal of music and its harmony theory: 'We must be color composers. Componere means to put together. My life belongs to color and its artistic compositions'. Thus modulated paintings could be rhythmic and geometric in some cases and representational and narrative in others

Adolf Hölzel, a pioneer of abstraction and an innovative art educator, became one of the most influential teachers of his time. His students at the Stuttgart Art Academy included Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Ida Kerkovius, and Willi Baumeister. Itten's teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus was largely based on Hölzel's theory of color and form

from: Art Museum Erfurt, Hölzel Exhibition July 13, 2019 - October 20, 2019, translated with www.deepl.com

Adolf Hölzel: Influencer Of His Time

Hölzel's work and teachings focused on the fundamental power of artistic elements such as form, color, and lines. He supported and exhibited the work of young Expressionists of his time. His work impacted artists of The Blue Rider and master teachers of the Bauhaus School

Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus School of Arts and Crafts was a school for architecture, design, and the arts.
Two of Hölzel's former students, Johannes Itten (who taught from 1919 until 1923) and Oskar Schlemmer (who taught from 1920 until 1929), were groundbreaking and formative figures in the Bauhaus movement

It was Itten who developed the Bauhaus preliminary course. In 1918, building on his studies with Adolf Hölzel at the art academy in Stuttgart, Itten ran his own private art school in Vienna. At the Weimar State Bauhaus, he devised a contemporary teaching method based on insights gained from the progressive educational movement and the artistic avant-garde

from: <https://www.bauhauskooperation.com/knowledge/the-bauhaus/training/preliminary-course/johannes-ittens-preliminary-course>

Artists such as these developed the ideas of the Bauhaus art movement further:

After the school closed in 1933, many Bauhaus teachers were forced to emigrate. They had an international influence on modern architecture, design, art, and art pedagogy

VIDEO The Black Mountain Collage and The Bauhaus

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York's exhibition, 'The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism', February 25 - July 2024,  revealed that artists of color, such as Jacob Lawrence (a Black Mountain College student), have proven their affiliation with modernism beyond any doubt. This changes the records of art history

Learn how Jacob Lawrence's artwork serves as a reference point for our ongoing engagement with Creative Compassion for Peacebuilding

The Adolf Hölzel Foundation documents the life and work of the artist Adolf Hölzel.

The Hölzel House in Stuttgart, Germany, where Hölzel worked and lived, is now a museum and art school. The museum holds a collection of the artist's work from different time periods, exhibits from the Hölzel Circle, Hölzel's original furniture, and a library

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